A Pop Songwriter’s Introduction to Jazz Chords
Songwriters and producers, ready to get jazzy? Here’s an introductory guide to building and using jazz chords in pop music!
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How Secondary Dominants Can Make Your Chord Progressions Less Boring
It’s not hard to break out of predictable chord patterns with a new mindset on harmony, and a bit of easy help from secondary dominants, too.
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How to Make Chords From Scales
Learning to read or write music? Here’s a quick guide to making chords within the various scales and modes you might encounter in music theory.
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How Do Key Signatures Work?
Learning to read or write music? Here’s a quick-yet-deep primer on how key signatures work across major, minor, modal, blues and other tonalities.
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Scale Mode Cheat Sheet: How to Remember Each and Every Mode
Modes and Key Signatures have a variety of different characteristics and are great for outside-the-box songwriting. Here’s a cheat sheet to remember them!
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Why Do We Like Sad Music So Much? On ‘Life and Death’ From ‘Lost’
Let’s look at how music can make a song sound sad even when there are no lyrics — and why we like that so much.
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Lots and Lots of Colored Dots: A Fretboard Explanation of Pop Tonality
Using the guitar fretboard as a template, music theorist Dean Olivet has redesigned harmonic notation in a colorful, intuitive methodology for learning.
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Quick Tracks Nº 8: Change the Tonality of a Popular Song
Welcome back to the dance floor, Quick Trackers! Once a month, we hook you up with a short production or songwriting challenge, aimed at helping to up your musicianship. To respond to the challenge, just email us, leave a comment, or post to social media with the hashtag #quicktracks and tag us @learntosoundfly. This week’s challenge is a fun way…
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Chartmania!! I Broke Down Every Song That Reached the Billboard Top 5 in 2017
Alright songwriters and song-guzzlers alike, strap on your boots for a knowledge voyage with more divergent rectangles than the NYC skyline: that’s right, the top pop charters have now become 2017’s top pop graphed. The Top 40 song charters that is, but why 40? Well, besides this number’s significance in pop music as a result of…
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How to Add Bittersweet Emotion to Your Chords with 7ths
You might understand the construction of a chord or triad, but here’s how to make your music express the heartbreaking lilt of a seventh chord.
